Chapel of the Apostles, School of Theology, Sewanee, Tennessee
15 January 2025
Text: John 10:11-18
Hearing Jesus’ speaking of himself as the Good Shepherd on the occasion of an ordination to the priesthood invites some comparisons. Jesus places himself squarely in the role occupied by other leaders and kings in his tradition. The prophets speak of God as the shepherd who will protect God’s people God from threats both within and outside the nation of Israel. The prophets also warn against bad shepherds who seek only their own good or well-being and not that of God’s people.
The longed-for Messiah, the annointed one for whom Jesus’ people have long prayed and hoped for is a thought of as a Good Shepherd, on the model of David himself. David who from youth was a shepherd, who, eager to convince King Saul to allow him into battle against Goliath, talks about how he defends his vulnerable sheep from the threats of lions and bears, seizing them by the jaws and killing them with his bare hands, even as a youth.
Jesus places himself in that long heritage of shepherds who have guided, protected, defended, sought out, rescued sheep. It’s a powerful metaphor, made powerful because it is rich in that it has many layers of meaning and history. And Jesus adds something new to the field of meaning of the pastoring. He says he is the Good Shepherd, not only for seeking the lost, but this closeness, the knowing of each sheep by name and character. Not only for this, but also for the fact that he loves each one...even unto death. Unlike the hired hand for whom the sheep are just means to make a living, the Good Shepherd has a relationship of care of love, of devotion: “I know my own and my own know me.” That Good Shepherd is good primarily because of that bond of compassion and love. The shepherd’s future, his own identity and well-being, are so interwoven with the sheep’s prospering that he is willing to lay down his life and be slain by a predator at the sheepgate. Indeed, he tells us that his quite literally is the sheepgate. If predators seek the sheep, they will have to defeat this Good Sheperd first, who it seems from Jesus’s slant on this, won’t be able to put up much of a fight and may actually lay down his life for the sake of the flock. Somewhat different attitude than what we heard from David seeking Saul’s permission to go into battle. Instead, Jesus’ strength is of a different sort. He says he’s willing to go further, and to do even the work of defeating death itself by dying.
Strange that in stained glass windows, we don’t see the Good Shepherd being attacked by wolves, foxes, bear. We see images of Jesus carrying one lost sheep or lamb back to safe pasture on his shoulders, or we see images of Jesus walking with a flock and a shepherd’s crook. We don’t see him on the ground as food for lions or bears or wolves. Instead, we see him on a cross, the slain by human sin, human fear and hatred. Human brutality done religion seeks the power of empire, and empire takes advantage of religious hatred.
Last month I confirmed a woman who decided to join this particular branch of God’s church after sensing that there was something missing from the local church where she had been involved for decades. The collusion of Christianity and political power, she said, was beginning to give her a bad feeling. But that’s not how she described it. She said “I didn’t understand it....it felt off for some reason, but I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t put words to my feelings. I’m not good with words. I prayed about it for several years. I hoped that God would help me get why I was feeling the way I was, or show me how to adjust. Then I was in a Bible study. We were studying the Sermon on the Mount. You know, ‘Blessed are the meek. Bless are you who mourn. Blessed are the poor’ You’re blessed when people say nasty things about you and spread lies about you.’ We were talking about all those strange “blesseds” and what it would be like to hear Jesus say those things today. The pastor leading our group said, ‘I wonder if we really need to talk about this Jesus here anymore. I mean, Jesus just doesn’t fit our agenda here anymore. Besides, I don’t think he really said these things. I mean, he comes off as so weak! Jesus is weak but we need a God of strength right now. We can’t be weak anymore. We need to be about strength.’”
So now, a few weeks later, we welcomed a new Episcopalian. Sounds like a win. But to be honest, I hope and pray she doesn’t find a similar troubling theology, just expressed in different politics or a different kind of class identity, just wearing new L.L. Bean instead of grease-stained Carhart.
My family once lived very close to a shepherd in Northern New England. Duncan was a good shepherd, though tending a small flock was part of a whole assortment of jobs that allowed him to make ends meet. Raising sheep for wool was just one thing he did. I’ll never forget the days when he came out to the field near us with a bucket of creosote...that black coal tar that smells awful. He came because a couple of his lambs that after a sudden thunderstorm had run through a barbed wire fence. The rusty steel barbs wounded their flanks, quite severely. He had sheared the tufts of wool around the gashes and washed the wounds, treated them with some special soap. But only a few days later they were getting more and more open, and ugly. Indeed, wormy maggots found their way into the sores and were making matters much worse. The lambs bleated in pain when Duncan, scooped the creosote with his bare hands, and gently applied it directly into the wounds. The infesting worms fell off, and after the initial screams, the lambs felt the relief of the balm.
I wish they taught me how to apply creosote to maggots at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. Maybe you do that here at the Sewanee. Or maybe, more likely, you don’t learn that unless you’ve been embedded for a long in a community of people with whom you saunter for food, scurry from storms, scrape across rusty barbs, and even become distracted by shepherds and leaders or trends whose intentions are less than beneficent or charitable.
AJ, as a priest, you are to proclaim God’s blessing, to anoint with both chrism at baptism and unction in healing and death, you are to proclaim that God is near, risen, healing, guiding, correcting, blessing. Blessing. A priest lives in the space of blessing. By that I mean, a priest assures that a good thing, a healing life-giving presence is at work, but those benefits and boons come from blood. Indeed the word blessing shares its root with the word blood. “Blessir” in French means not at all to bless as we mean it in English, but to wound. How else, why else, would we offer the sign of the cross, a sign of malice, torture, and death, when we offer a benediction. Blood and boon are connected. I have come to see the sign of the cross is God, through the priest, saying something like “I see you. I see you where you’re bleeding. I see you that you are enduring or accompanying. And I’m going there, too. I’m going right in there, into those wounds, too.” Making the sign of the cross at the eucharist, after confession, at a death bed has that meaning. Otherwise, it’s just saying, “Good luck with whatever you’re going through. See you next week!”
These are hard things to say, but they occur to one after meditating on the ministry of the Good Shepherd in silence for a long time. We all encounter the ministry of a Duncan, a Good Shepherd when we go for any period of time on retreat. It’s in silence when which the wounds of our lives come back to us, sometimes with a the spiritual equivalent of maggots and lice, once the anesthetizing busy-ness of work and vocation and striving wears off. To enter the life of a convent or a monastery—for a day, a week to is allow space for the pain of life to show itself. To read the ancient witness from the desert it should not be a surprise that shepherding souls into the blessing of silence is hard work. Silence is hard. The spiritual pests come to invade the ego that wants to keep up appearances. What appearance, of strength, of attractiveness, or achievement or accomplishment does a death on the cross really save or redeem. Not much. Your work, AJ, Sister Hannah, and our companions, in opening the Convent to the lost, the wounded, the searching, (which is all of us) is not really that different than my friend Duncan’s work with his bucket of coal tar and his tender and firm touch with healing balm, skillfully applied.
That of course is the heritage of the Sisters of St. Mary, of Constance and her Companions and the Martyrs of Memphis. They were following the call of the Good Shepherd even to the point of embodying the Good Shepherd’s ministry even as they lay down their own lives for those in their care under the ravages of Yellow Fever. Those who saw them in Memphis in 1878 saw the face of the Good Shepherd, ready to lay down his life for his beloved.
There may be a time, and it may be sooner than we can foresee, when deacons, priests, monks and nuns, bishops and any minister of this church will be called to such sacrificial service in the name of the Good Shepherd. The planet is plainly telling us, the gaping gaps in our economy is telling us, the incessant state of wars is telling us, that we are entering a time of trial, indeed the time of trial is upon us. This is a time when the disciplines of a spiritual life, the rigors of prayer and participation the sacraments are called for with eschatological urgency. Many are convinced it’s a time to shout and fight in righteous activism, like David against the Goliaths of our day. There is certainly warrant for this. And, I am one who believes that it is a time to first be still in the space between blood and balm, the space of blessing. We need priests today who are able to endure silence, and to find in silence and prayer the ground for right and creative action. We are here because we need priests like you, AJ. The strength we need from Jesus is the strength he always tells us about: to be willing to be wrong, to turn, to let go, to sacrifice, to appear to be an illogical fool, to even to die so that Resurrection Power may be made newly real.
Priests lead us by their shepherding to The Good Shepherd, who, thank God, is not you or me, except as we can lead God’s wounded people to a presence, which is The Presence, in the Risen Jesus.
AJ we are all eager to see the ways the Holy Spirit will inspire you to bless God’s people, God’s church, for the sake of the world. In the name of Jesus, the Good Shepherd. AMEN